Spokane Regional Health District establishes review boards to combat rising overdose and suicide deaths

SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane County continues to see rising overdose deaths and suicides. The Spokane Regional Health District wants to help change that.

Over the last five years, overdose deaths in Spokane County have continued to rise. Most are from using opioids like fentanyl.

The health district hopes its new review boards will look past the numbers.

“When you’re looking at overdose and suicide, a lot of what we’re looking at is data. Data is just numbers; it’s one-dimensional. It doesn’t really paint the picture of how or why the person ended up in that situation, dying of an overdose or suicide,” said Josh Pierce, program manager for the Spokane Regional Health District.

The health district plans to form separate review boards for suicide and overdoses in the coming months. It aims to bring together organizations to identify gaps in the healthcare system.

“What was the gap in care? Is there a theme that emerges that people were released from a facility or situation that didn’t necessarily have access to a mental health appointment? Was one not made? Did people have transportation barriers to mental health?” Pierce said.

Each of the review boards will include representatives from local fire departments and paramedics.

“We really want to have experts that are in the field, but we also want to have people with lived experience that have been in situations where they have encountered overdoses,” Pierce said.

Some overdoses happen when people forget they’ve already taken their medication and take it too often by mistake. The review board hopes to separate these different cases and figure out what’s causing the rise in overdoses.

The health district will create a team to take data from these review boards and use it to create solutions for mental health and overdoses in the community.

“The de-identified information then gets put into a different report for the prevention action teams. But it’s all de-identified information that’s basically just saying these are the themes, these are the strategies on how to adjust and prevent these from occurring,” Pierce said.

Many people around the county hope public health will take more action in preventing suicide and overdose deaths. That includes Kitara Johnson-Jones, who lost her son earlier this year to a fentanyl overdose.

She founded Gabriel’s Challenge in her son’s name and hopes this review board will make a difference.

“We need people on a review board that is interdisciplinary, that will hold us to a place where we can create policy change. If that review board is just reviewing data, it’s no different than anything else the county has done,” Johnson-Jones said.

The health district expects each board to start working early next year.